Bruce Read online

  It happened in the first week of August 1968. And while not every eighteen-year-old Freeholder had become enraptured by the drugs and weirdness that had become the definitive mark of their generation, the Freehold Police Department had already concluded that the stream of drugs flowing into town, and the enthusiastic consumption of same by young Freeholders, had grown to disturbing proportions. They weren’t exactly wrong. Marijuana had been remarkably easy to find since the summer of 1967, assuming you knew the right people. By 1968, those same people could also be relied upon to supply LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, amphetamines, downers, cocaine, DMT, crystal meth, heroin—the whole candy store. Naturally, the question of who was doing which drugs became a hot topic among the younger set. When some group of stoners started wearing necklaces strung with small, colorful discs (distributed originally as part of a cereal box game), you didn’t have to look further than a kid’s neck to figure out his or her drug of choice: green stood for grass, yellow was LSD, red for speed freaks, and so on. All good fun for the devil-may-care youth of Freehold until it turned out that one of their number was either a narcotics officer or someone yearning to become one. Once the cops knew the secret, the necklaces did the rest of their work for them. It took about a week for them to put together the names, addresses, and drugs of choice.

  The police cars rolled at four in the morning. They hit virtually every neighborhood in town, the officers pounding on family doors in the middle of the night, flashing their warrants, conducting their searches, collecting what they already knew they would find, and hauling the young lawbreakers off to jail. By the time the sun rose, the entire town was scandalized. “They were all living with their mommies and daddies, and the police came and took them out of their mommies’ and daddies’ houses!” Bruce recalls with mock horror. “That’s in the middle of the night! Who had ever heard of such a thing? There had been no busts before! That word, the act itself, was unknown. People were shocked! Here in River City?” The drama made a big impact on the Castiles, largely because Vinny Maniello, Paul Popkin, and Curt Fluhr got nabbed in the dragnet. “All I remember is that I woke up one morning and half the guys were gone,” Bruce says. “George and I were on the outside and said, ‘Well, this seems like a good moment to call it a day.’”

  A day or two later, Bruce happened upon John Graham and Mike Burke, a pair of slightly younger musicians (they were sixteen or seventeen) from New Shrewsbury. Just finishing an unsatisfying run with a blues-and-Stones cover band called Something Blue, the bassist and drummer were on the hunt for a singer-guitarist when they overheard Bruce talking about the big drug bust in Freehold. The three musicians chatted for a while, and when they got to their mutual love for Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the best of the psychedelic blues bands, and both three-piece groups—and with a replacement band needed for the Castiles’ gig at the Le Teendezvous club on August 10, it all clicked together. “I was ready to power trio, you know,” Bruce says. “I think we rehearsed a night or two and played that weekend. And then there was no looking back.”

  Calling themselves Earth (shortened from the original the Earth Band), the trio—which performed as a quartet whenever the Castiles’ gifted organist Bob Alfano hauled his Hammond to a show—built a repertoire from the most popular works of Cream, Hendrix, Traffic, the Yardbirds, and Steppenwolf, whose just-released single “Born to Be Wild” became one of Earth’s big set closers. Specializing in such jam-heavy songs made it easy to play long shows, particularly given Bruce’s increasingly dynamic guitar work. Soon a pair of aspiring young managers named Fran Duffy and Rick Spachner convinced Bruce, Burke, and Graham to let them guide their nascent career and booked an assortment of shows to keep the band busy through the fall.

  At the same time, Bruce, who still felt out of place in academic surroundings, surrendered to his parents’ pleas and registered for another fall term at Ocean County Community College. His new bandmates, both of whom grew up in a well-to-do town where education was taken seriously, helped keep him motivated. “They were smart, they seemed educated, and they had families that seemed educated,” Bruce says. “Those kids were going to college, which made them different than my Freehold buddies, who were going to Vietnam.” Crashing in the Graham family’s basement (where the band rehearsed), Bruce absorbed the leafy suburban zeitgeist of New Shrewsbury, and for a time tried on its expectations. Both Graham and Burke were enthusiastic readers and writers, so when they ran out of music talk, the three boys considered their literary futures. Temporarily fired up about his academic prospects, Bruce told his bandmates that he now planned to pivot from his two years at Ocean County and jump into the journalism school at Columbia University. Graham and Burke had no doubt that he could do exactly that. “He was very impressive and likable,” Burke says. “A very nice guy, funny, smart, and knowledgeable about music,” Graham says. “And onstage he was fearless.”

  • • •

  The administrators at Ocean County Community College felt less confident of their own futures. With so many other colleges and universities becoming battlegrounds of protest, dissent, and, sometimes, pitched riots, they feared the same thing happening at their own as-yet-unaccredited institution (those formalities were concluded in 1969), a prospect the school seemed far too fragile to survive. Hoping to stave off that calamity, the administrators decided to be proactive: they’d look for kids who seemed not to fit in with their peers, and then keep an eye on them. Not to control them or concoct reasons to eject them, of course. Just to make sure everyone was happy. And not planning to blow anything, or anyone, to smithereens.

  Instantly, Bruce was on the school’s radar. “There were only a handful of us with long hair, and he was one of them,” says classmate Bo Ross. “We all sat together at one table in the student union, hanging around and talking.” Bruce, he recalls, didn’t say very much and wore metal-framed sunglasses with yellow lenses that made him look like an assassin. Usually absorbed in his own thoughts. Bruce impressed, or perhaps unsettled, the other students by abruptly filling a silent hallway with a burst of hoarse-voiced melody. Once again, he seemed so far out on his own wavelength that even the aggro jocks who so enjoyed bullying the hippie kids kept their distance. “He just seemed too weird to mess with, I guess,” Ross says.

  Perhaps all that public strangeness was another performance—an encore of the routine that kept him so comfortably distant during his boyhood. But in the confines of his Advanced Composition class, Bruce felt free enough to throw open the doors to his hidden depths. Written neatly on college-ruled paper, Bruce’s short stories read like dark meditations on a world leeched of humanity. In one piece, the narrator spies a woman alone at night, “caressed only by the icy hands of the moon. She shared her love and was crushed by the greediness of those to whom she gave.” His teacher awarded the story an A and scrawled his praises in the paper’s margins: “Oh, Bruce, you have a lovely mind . . . at least what shows on paper.” Another paper earned another A, and praise for his use of imagery and metaphor but ends with a plea for more information: “Where do you want to go? Until I know your direction, I can’t help you at all.”

  But Bruce’s most striking composition is also his most disturbing. Even his admiring teacher appended his/her A grade with a note admitting “I can’t pretend I enjoyed the story,” and for good reason. Starkly composed and washed in misery, the story describes a young girl, clad in a thin white party dress, attacked by a “faceless creature” that “beat her fragile body down upon the hard pavement.” Vivid descriptions of the girl’s wounds and the bloody shreds of her dress lead to a final image of the mangled girl dying slowly on the pavement, “[c]rucified upon the cross of night by the violence of man.”3

  At some point during Bruce’s third semester at OCCC, he got a message in his mailbox: Could he make an appointment to speak with the school counselor? He did as asked, and as Bruce remembers, the conversation was extraordinarily personal and hurtful. “I was told people were complaining about me,”
he says. “And to be honest with you, that’s all they said. It was weird. I said, ‘What about?’ but it was nothing.” In earlier tellings, Bruce recalled that his fellow students had gone so far as to circulate a petition demanding that he be ejected from school, on account of being too odd to countenance. But Bo Ross finds that story far fetched at best, if only because Bruce wasn’t the only student who received a referral to the counselor’s office. Determined to head off that dreaded student riot, the administration had sent the same request to all of the kids who spent their lunch hours at the cafeteria’s long-hair table.

  “We all had an appointment,” Ross says. “And the guy was cool. He’d ask for our thoughts on certain things, and I kind of liked it, actually.” But for Bruce, who still swears the counselor described the petition calling for his ouster, it was another in a long line of school-based humiliations. “It kind of cemented my feelings that I was someplace I didn’t really belong,” he says. “And, really, I had the one [Advanced Composition] class that I was enjoying, and I did get some value out of it, because it did encourage me. And the rest was just another instance of, you know, it’s just not your time.”

  • • •

  Earth played a series of shows in the usual Monmouth County spots—Le Teendezvous, the Off Broad Street Coffee House, the Hullabaloo—through the fall, building enough of a reputation to draw crowds throughout the region. But although the group had played a semester-starting concert at Ocean County Community College in September, Bruce kept his musical life separate from his academic identity. Even his pals at the hippie table knew nothing about Earth, or Bruce’s ability to play guitar, until a friend of Bo Ross’s came in talking about this hot new band he’d just seen. “He was saying, ‘Holy shit, this guy is good,’” Ross recalls. And he wasn’t just talking about Bruce’s prowess on guitar. “What impressed him the most was that this guy got onstage and just activated everyone. He just had a presence.” A few days later another friend from the hippie table brought in a picture of Bruce playing with Earth onstage. “He looked great up there, too. And we thought he was weird, right? So we were like . . . wow.”

  At the same time, managers Spachner and Duffy had secured Earth a gig at the famous Fillmore East theater, then the New York showcase for virtually every significant hippie/psychedelic band coming through the city. Bruce was already a regular concertgoer at the Fillmore—going alone, generally, to check out whoever was in town and absorb what he could from the bands’ musical and stage performances for subsequent adaptation and use—but on this day, the Fillmore was officially closed. The audience, such as it was, would be the cast of NYPD: Now You’re Practically Dead, an arty, albeit porny film that included a wild party scene set at a rock concert. Earth’s job was to play the band onstage, lip-syncing to a song recorded by a group called Rhinoceros4 while the actors and extras danced, tore off their clothes, and tussled and rolled across the stage around them. “So while we’re lip-syncing, the director’s giving direction to this hot babe to take off her top,” Burke says. “Bruce had this look on his face.” Later in the evening, the director took to the catwalk above the stage to film a midair sex scene punctuated at one crucial moment by a shot of panties tumbling through the spotlights to drape elegantly across the tuning pegs on Bruce’s guitar. The film was never released, but Earth still collected their enormous (to them) fee of $350 for the day’s work.

  The band’s next (and last) New York gig was as half the bill in a December 28 show booked into the Crystal Ballroom, an 1,800-capacity hall in the Diplomat Hotel on West Forty-third Street. It didn’t take long for the promoters to realize they’d made a serious error: Earth was completely unknown in New York, and the fans it did have lived on the Jersey Shore. Facing economic disaster, the promoters came up with the brilliant solution of renting some buses and offering to transport Jersey fans to and from the show for free. When the OCCC activities committee agreed to help promote the shows, the tickets began to move. By the time Earth hit the stage on the twenty-eighth, the hall was nearly sold out, giving the trio the largest audience it would ever have.

  And there were some special guests in the seats. As Spachner told Bruce, Graham, and Burke the next day, two executives from different major labels5 had buttonholed him after the show, both eager to sign the group to a recording contract. But nothing that serious could happen, Spachner added, until each member of the band signed a contract designating Spachner and Duffy as the band’s official managers. The only problem was that Graham and Burke were still young enough to require their parents to countersign their legal agreements. And neither set of parents was happy about the amount of time and energy their sons were investing in their music hobby. Spachner and Duffy put together a presentation to appeal to the boys’ parents. “But even going in, I had a feeling of doom because my situation at home was tenuous at best,” Burke says. “I had an absolutely terrible relationship with my parents, and John was even worse off.” The contracts did not get signed.

  Earth played a small handful of shows in the first weeks of 1969, including a dance in the Ocean County Community College student union6 and a pair of nights at the Le Teendezvous club. A February 14 show scheduled originally for the Paddock Lounge in Long Branch sold out so quickly that the promoters rebooked the “St. Valentines Day Massacre,” as they called it, for a larger room at the town’s Italian American Men’s Association Clubhouse. The show was another good night for Earth, and a great one for Bruce, whose screaming guitar and catalytic presence as a front man riveted one tall onlooker at the back of the room. Vini Lopez had known of Bruce since his days as the drummer in local guitar hero Sonny Kenn’s band, Sonny and the Starfighters, when they shared concert bills with the Castiles. When Lopez learned that the teenage guitar player was the same guy his Asbury Park music pals were talking about, he drove up to Long Branch to see what was going on. He was not disappointed. “Imagine your rock star, and there he was, right in front of you, when he was a kid,” Lopez says. “I didn’t need any more convincing.”

  Earth would never play in public again.

  FOUR

  OH GEEZ, LET’S MAKE A BAND

  ON THE MORNING OF SUNDAY, February 23, 1969, sometime after three o’clock, Bruce climbed the stairs to the Upstage Club’s third-floor entrance. Sitting on a stool at the top of the steps, Margaret Potter, who owned the Asbury Park club with her husband, Tom, watched him coming. He seemed underfed and, given his worn-out clothes, dangling black curls, and beat-up guitar case, even more ragamuffin than most of the rest of the Upstage’s waifish clientele.

  “Is it okay if I play my guitar here tonight?”

  The Upstage had been around almost exactly one year, so a lot of unknown guitar slingers had already climbed those very steps to ask that very question, all hoping to join the club’s after-midnight jam sessions. Ordinarily, she’d have a kid sign in on the clipboard and tell him to hang out until he heard his name called over the PA. But the musicians were taking a break, and something in Bruce’s voice, or maybe the way he couldn’t seem to hold eye contact, made her warm to him.

  “That’s why it’s there,” she said, gesturing to the microphones and amps on the stage. “Go ahead and plug in.”

  It wasn’t Bruce’s first visit to the Upstage. As coincidence would have it, he’d come in a month or two earlier to see the Downtown Tangiers Band, an Asbury Park group made up of singer-guitarist Billy Chinnock, bassist Wendell John, keyboardist Danny Federici, and Vini Lopez on drums. Bruce was impressed: “I thought that Vini and them were superstars. They just all seemed great,” he says. But the after-hours, jam-happy club—its floor teeming with musicians, serious fans, and musician-eyed girls—made him fall in love. “I just thought, ‘This is the coolest place I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

  Exactly a week after Earth’s Valentine’s Day show, Bruce went back to the Upstage, guitar in hand. Given Margaret Potter’s approval, he climbed the steps to the stage, opened his case to retrieve his new gold-top Les Paul, and s
lung the strap over his head. Feeling the instrument’s weight on his shoulder, he cranked the volume and took a breath. “I came to stun, you know,” he says now.

  At the start of 1969, the Upstage was the place to do it. Opened in March 1968 as a coffee house with live music, the club—located above a Thom McAn shoe store in downtown Asbury Park—was for musicians and serious music fans excited by the postmidnight jam sessions that kept the place thumping until dawn. Potter took a lease on the building’s third floor that fall, building a larger stage equipped with a powerful PA system, lights, and a closet full of instruments to keep the jams going at full throttle. Drifting into the dawn above Cookman Avenue, the Upstage was like an ark for the Jersey Shore’s musicians and other young renegades—a world bathed in black light and strobes, where the rhythm of life revolved around the club’s day-for-night schedule.

  Without looking up, Bruce let loose a long, soaring run up the neck of his guitar. The sound razored the smoky air. He kept going, his fingers spidering across the frets, chasing melodies, doubling into harmonies, reversing direction, and then leaping skyward again. Heads swiveled. Conversations stuttered to a stop. Within moments, all eyes turned to the guitarist, his face still hidden behind the curls draped over his face.

  “That quickly, he took over the room.”